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MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY

[From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.


All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to
exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot,
French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as


Communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has
not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more
advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary
adversaries?

Two things result from this fact.

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers to be itself


a Power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the
whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet
this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the
party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London,


and sketched the following Manifesto, to be published in the English,
French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS


The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class
struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant
opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-
constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending
classes.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated


arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social
rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the
Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen,
apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate
gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal
society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established
new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place
of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses,
however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms.
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile
camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and
Proletariat.

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the
earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the
bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh


ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets,
the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the
means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to
navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to
the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid
development.
The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production was
monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing
wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The
guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class;
division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the
face of division of labour in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery
revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken
by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by
industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern
bourgeois.

Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the


discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense
development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This
development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in
proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the
same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and
pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle
Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a


long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of
production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a


corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under
the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in
the mediaeval commune; here independent urban republic (as in Italy and
Germany), there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France),
afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-
feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility,
and, in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the
bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and
of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative
State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but
a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all
feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the
motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left
remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest,
than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies
of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine
sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved
personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and
indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable
freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious
and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto


honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the
physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its
paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and
has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display
of vigour in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found
its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the
first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished
wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic
cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former
Exoduses of nations and crusades.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the


instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and
with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes
of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition
of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of
production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier
ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air,
all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with
sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the
bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle
everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a


cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of
industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national
industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are
dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death
question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up
indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones;
industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every
quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the
productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their
satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old
local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in
every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material,
so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual
nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-
mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous
national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of


production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws
all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of
its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all
Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate
hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to
introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become
bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It
has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population
as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of
the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the
country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-
barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants
on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered
state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It
has agglomerated production, and has concentrated property in a few
hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation.
Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests,
laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into
one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-
interest, one frontier and one customs-tariff. The bourgeoisie, during its
rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more
colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of
chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric
telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of
rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier
century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered
in the lap of social labour?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose


foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal
society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of
production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society
produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and
manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property
became no longer compatible with the already developed productive
forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they
were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and


political constitution adapted to it, and by the economical and political
sway of the bourgeois class.

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois


society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a
society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of
exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers
of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a
decade past the history of industry and commerce is but the history of
the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of
production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the
existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. It is enough to mention the
commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each
time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society.
In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of
the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In
these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs,
would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production.
Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary
barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had
cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce
seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation,
too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to
further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the
contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which
they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they
bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the
existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are
too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the
bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand inforced destruction
of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new
markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is
to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises,
and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground
are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to
itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those
weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same


proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed—a
class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find
work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who
must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article
of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of
competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the


work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and
consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the
machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily
acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of
a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence
that he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race.
But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its
cost of production. In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the
work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of
machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the
burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working
hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased
speed of the machinery, etc.
Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal
master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of
labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As
privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a
perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of
the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly
enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the
individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this
despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more
hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in
other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is
the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and
sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All
are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to
their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far


at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the
other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the
pawnbroker, etc.

The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople,


shopkeepers, retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and
peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because
their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern
Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large
capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by
the new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all
classes of the population.

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its


birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is
carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory,
then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual
bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not
against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the
instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that
compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set
factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of
the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over
the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If
anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the
consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the
bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is
compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for
a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not
fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of
absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the
petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in
the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for
the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in
number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows,
and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of
life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in
proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly
everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition
among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages
of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of
machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and
more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual
bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two
classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (Trades
Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the
rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make
provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the
contest breaks out into riots.
Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real
fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-
expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved
means of communication that are created by modern industry and that
place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It
was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local
struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between
classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to
attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable
highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways,
achieve in a few years.

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a


political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between
the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer,
mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the
workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie
itself. Thus the ten-hours' bill in England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in


many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie
finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy;
later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests
have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all times, with
the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles it sees itself
compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for its help, and thus, to
drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies
the proletariat with its own instruments of political and general
education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for
fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling classes


are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are
at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the
proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.
Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the
process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the
whole range of society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a
small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the
revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as,
therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the
bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the
proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who
have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the
historical movement as a whole.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the
proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay
and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is
its special and essential product. The lower middle class, the small
manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight
against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as
fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but
conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back
the wheel of history. If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so
only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus
defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their
own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The "dangerous class," the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown
off by the lowest layers of old society, may, here and there, be swept
into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life,
however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary
intrigue.

In the conditions of the proletariat, those of old society at large are


already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his
relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with
the bourgeois family-relations; modern industrial labour, modern
subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in
Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law,
morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which
lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their
already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions
of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the
productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous
mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of
appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify;
their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of,
individual property.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the


interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious,
independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the
immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present
society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole
superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with
the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each
country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own
bourgeoisie.

In depicting the most general phases of the development of the


proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within
existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open
revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the
foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen,
on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to
oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it
can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of
serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty
bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a
bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the
progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of
existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops
more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident,
that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society,
and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding
law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to
its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into
such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society
can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is
no longer compatible with society.

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the
bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the
condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on
competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose
involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the
labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to
association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from
under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and
appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above
all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are
equally inevitable.

II. PROLETARIANS AND COMMUNISTS

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-


class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat
as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to


shape and mould the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties
by this only: (1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the
different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common
interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. (2) In
the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class
against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere
represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most
advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every
country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand,
theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the
advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and
the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

The immediate aim of the Communist is the same as that of all the other
proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow
of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the
proletariat.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on


ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that
would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms,
actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a
historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of
existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of
Communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to


historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour


of bourgeois property.

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property


generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois
private property is the final and most complete expression of the system
of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class
antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the


single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the


right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour,
which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom,
activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property


of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that
preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the
development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and
is still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It
creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and
which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of
wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based
on the antagonism of capital and wage-labour. Let us examine both sides
of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status


in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action
of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all
members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the


property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby
transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the
property that is changed. It loses its class-character.
Let us now take wage-labour.

The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum
of the means of subsistence, which is absolutely requisite in bare
existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates
by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare
existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation
of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the
maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus
wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away
with, is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the
labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so
far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated


labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen,
to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in


Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society
capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is
dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois,


abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of
bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is
undoubtedly aimed at.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of


production, free trade, free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears
also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave
words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if
any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered
traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the
Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of
production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in
your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-
tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its
non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us,
therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the
necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any
property for the immense majority of society.

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your


property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital,
money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from
the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into
bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality
vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no other


person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This
person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of


society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the
labour of others by means of such appropriation.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work
will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the
dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire
nothing, and those who acquire anything, do not work. The whole of this
objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no
longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.
All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and
appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged
against the Communistic modes of producing and appropriating intellectual
products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property
is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class
culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority,
a mere training to act as a machine.

But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of
bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom,
culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions
of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your
jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will,
whose essential character and direction are determined by the
economical conditions of existence of your class.

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws
of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present
mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise
and disappear in the progress of production—this misconception you share
with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the
case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property,
you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois
form of property.

Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous
proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?


On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family
exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its
complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians,
and in public prostitution.
The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its
complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by


their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we
replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social
conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or
indirect, of society, by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not
invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to
alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from
the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the
hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting,
the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the
proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple
articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the


whole bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears


that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and,
naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being
common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the
status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of
our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be
openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have
no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from
time immemorial.
Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their
proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take
the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives.

Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at


the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that
they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an
openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that
the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the
abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of
prostitution both public and private.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish


countries and nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they
have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political
supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must
constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the
bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and
more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom
of commerce, to the world-market, to uniformity in the mode of
production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.
United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the
first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an


end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end
to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation
vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.
The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical,
and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious
examination.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and
conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change
in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his
social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual
production changes its character in proportion as material production is
changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its
ruling class.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionise society, they do but


express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one
have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even
pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were
overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th
century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with
the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and
freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free
competition within the domain of knowledge.

"Undoubtedly," it will be said, "religious, moral, philosophical and juridical


ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But
religion, morality philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived
this change."

"There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc. that
are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal
truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting
them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past
historical experience."
What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past
society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms,
antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past
ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No
wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the
multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or
general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total
disappearance of class antagonisms.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional


property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most
radical rupture with traditional ideas.

But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working
class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling as to win the
battle of democracy.

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all
capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in
the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling
class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as
possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of


despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of
bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear
economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the
movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old
social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising
the mode of production.

These measures will of course be different in different countries.


Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty
generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to


public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a


national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the


hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the


State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement
of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies,


especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual


abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable
distribution of the population over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of


children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education
with industrial production, &c., &c.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared,


and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast
association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political
character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised
power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its
contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances,
to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself
the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of
production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the
conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes
generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class
antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development
of each is the condition for the free development of all.

III. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE

1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM

A. Feudal Socialism

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the


aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern
bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830, and in the
English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the
hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political contest was altogether
out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in
the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period had
become impossible.

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose sight,


apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate their indictment
against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class
alone. Thus the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on
their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming
catastrophe.

In this way arose Feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half
echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty
and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core;
but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend
the march of modern history.

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the


proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it
joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and
deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

One section of the French Legitimists and "Young England" exhibited this
spectacle.

In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of


the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under
circumstances and conditions that were quite different, and that are now
antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat
never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary
offspring of their own form of society.

For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their
criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeoisie amounts to
this, that under the bourgeois regime a class is being developed, which is
destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.

What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a
proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.

In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against


the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high falutin phrases,
they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of
industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool,
beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits.

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has
Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has


not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage,
against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and
poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother
Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy, water with which the priest
consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.

B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the
bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and
perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The mediaeval
burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the
modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed,
industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side
with the rising bourgeoisie.

In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new


class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat
and bourgeoisie and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of
bourgeois society. The individual members of this class, however, are
being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of
competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment
approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent
section of modern society, to be replaced, in manufactures, agriculture
and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.

In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than
half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the
proletariat against the bourgeoisie, should use, in their criticism of the
bourgeois regime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and
from the standpoint of these intermediate classes should take up the
cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism.
Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in
England.

This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the


contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the
hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the
disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration
of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed
out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of
the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the
distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between
nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of
the old nationalities.

In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to


restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the
old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern
means of production and of exchange, within the framework of the old
property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by
those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.

Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture, patriarchal


relations in agriculture.

Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating


effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit
of the blues.

C. German, or "True," Socialism

The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that


originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the
expression of the struggle against this power, was introduced into
Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun
its contest with feudal absolutism.

German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits, eagerly


seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings
immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not
immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions,
this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance, and
assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the
eighteenth century, the demands of the first French Revolution were
nothing more than the demands of "Practical Reason" in general, and the
utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified in
their eyes the law of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true
human Will generally.

The world of the German literate consisted solely in bringing the new
French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or
rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own
philosophic point of view.

This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is
appropriated, namely, by translation.

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over
the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had
been written. The German literate reversed this process with the profane
French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the
French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the
economic functions of money, they wrote "Alienation of Humanity," and
beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois State they wrote
"dethronement of the Category of the General," and so forth.

The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of


the French historical criticisms they dubbed "Philosophy of
Action," "True Socialism," "German Science of Socialism,"
"Philosophical Foundation of Socialism," and so on.

The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely


emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express
the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having
overcome "French one-sidedness" and of representing, not true
requirements, but the requirements of truth; not the interests of the
proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who
belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of
philosophical fantasy.
This German Socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and
solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such mountebank fashion,
meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.

The fight of the German, and especially, of the Prussian bourgeoisie,


against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the
liberal movement, became more earnest.

By this, the long wished-for opportunity was offered to "True" Socialism


of confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of
hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against
representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois
freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and
equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain,
and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism
forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it
was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its
corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political
constitution adapted thereto, the very things whose attainment was the
object of the pending struggle in Germany.

To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors,


country squires and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against
the threatening bourgeoisie.

It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets with
which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German
working-class risings.

While this "True" Socialism thus served the governments as a weapon for
fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly
represented a reactionary interest, the interest of the German
Philistines. In Germany the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth
century, and since then constantly cropping up again under various forms,
is the real social basis of the existing state of things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in
Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie
threatens it with certain destruction; on the one hand, from the
concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary
proletariat. "True" Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one
stone. It spread like an epidemic.

The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric,


steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which
the German Socialists wrapped their sorry "eternal truths," all skin and
bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such
a public. And on its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more, its
own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois
Philistine.

It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German
petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this
model man it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact
contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly
opposing the "brutally destructive" tendency of Communism, and of
proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles.
With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist
publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of
this foul and enervating literature.

2. CONSERVATIVE, OR BOURGEOIS, SOCIALISM

A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in


order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.

To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians,


improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity,
members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals,
temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind.
This form of Socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete
systems.
We may cite Proudhon's Philosophie de la Misere as an example of this
form.

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social


conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting
therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its
revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie
without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in
which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this
comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In
requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to
march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in
reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing
society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the
bourgeoisie.

A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism
sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the
working class, by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change
in the material conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be of
any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of
existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands
abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be
effected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the
continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no
respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best,
lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois
government.

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression, when, and only when, it


becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for
the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the
working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of
bourgeois Socialism.
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the
benefit of the working class.

3. CRITICAL-UTOPIAN SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM

We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern


revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such
as the writings of Babeuf and others.

The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made
in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being
overthrown, these attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then
undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the
economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be
produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone.
The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of
the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated
universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.

The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called, those of Saint-


Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence in the early
undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat
and bourgeoisie (see Section 1. Bourgeois and Proletarians).

The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well
as the action of the decomposing elements, in the prevailing form of
society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the
spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent
political movement.

Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the
development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not
as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the
proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new
social laws, that are to create these conditions.
Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically
created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones, and the gradual,
spontaneous class-organisation of the proletariat to the organisation of
society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves
itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of
their social plans.

In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring chiefly for
the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only
from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the
proletariat exist for them.

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own


surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far
superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of
every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they
habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by
preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they
understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the
best possible state of society?

Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action;
they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small
experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example,
to pave the way for the new social Gospel.

Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the


proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic
conception of its own position correspond with the first instinctive
yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.

But these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical


element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are
full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working
class. The practical measures proposed in them—such as the abolition of
the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying
on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage
system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the
functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production, all
these proposals, point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms
which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these
publications, are recognised in their earliest, indistinct and undefined
forms only. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian
character.

The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an


inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern
class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing
apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical
value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators
of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples
have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the
original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical
development of the proletariat. They, therefore, endeavour, and that
consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class
antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social
Utopias, of founding isolated "phalansteres," of establishing "Home
Colonies," of setting up a "Little Icaria"—duodecimo editions of the New
Jerusalem—and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled
to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they
sink into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted
above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by
their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their
social science.

They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the
working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind
unbelief in the new Gospel.

The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively,


oppose the Chartists and the Reformistes.
IV. POSITION OF THE COMMUNISTS IN RELATION TO THE
VARIOUS EXISTING OPPOSITION PARTIES

Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class
parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America.

The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the
enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the
movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the
future of that movement. In France the Communists ally themselves with
the Social-Democrats, against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie,
reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to
phrases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution.

In Switzerland they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact
that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic
Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.

In Poland they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as


the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented
the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.

In Germany they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a


revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy,
and the petty bourgeoisie.

But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class
the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between
bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may
straightaway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social
and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce
along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the
reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself
may immediately begin.

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that


country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried
out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation, and with a
much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the
seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the
bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately
following proletarian revolution.

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary


movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in
each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at
the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the
democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.


They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by
the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

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